§26.20 Physical Applications

An English translation of Pólya (1937) on applications of
combinatorics to chemistry has been published as Pólya and Read (1987). Other
articles on this subject are de Bruijn (1981) and
Rouvray (1995). The latter reference also describes chemical
applications of other combinatorial techniques.

Applications of combinatorics, especially integer and plane partitions, to
counting lattice structures and other problems of statistical mechanics,
of which the Ising model is the principal example, can be found in
Montroll (1964), Godsil et al. (1995), Baxter (1982), and
Korepin et al. (1993). For an application of statistical mechanics to
combinatorics, see Bressoud (1999).

Other applications to problems in engineering, crystallography, biology, and
computer science can be found in Beckenbach (1981) and
Graham et al. (1995).